On Alternative Media

Free Republic is doing backflips over a blog that wrongly claims that the Village Voice has ceased publication. In fact, the Voice is merely moving out of its longtime office building next spring due to the expansion of the high school next door. Putting that silly lie aside, here's how the blog author characterizes alternative media:

All that was left for the alternative media was to run yet another profile of a new bar where people drink the tears of Ecuadoran children purchased through fair trade while looking at themselves doing it in video monitors as an artistic commentary on capitalism. And these days that's what the internet is for. A culture eager to document itself doing everything, take photos of the food on its plate, review the movie on Twitter while watching it and run a blog about its street corner is in no need of an alternative paper to kludgily do these things for it at a snail's pace.

Alternative represented the hipster ethos of being different for difference's sake. It's why every indie quarter boasts signs like, "Keep Portland Weird" and "Keep Austin Weird", not to mention "Keep Berkeley Weird". But how do you stay weird when everyone is trying to be weird at the same time? What does weirdness even mean when everyone is weird and doing their best to get a condo in weirdsville, only to move out in protest because weirdsville isn't weird enough anymore?